


First Contact

by incognitajones



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (sort of), Alternate Universe - Fusion, Darkover - Freeform, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-09-25 02:54:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17113091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/pseuds/incognitajones
Summary: So Rey had crash landed on the very first world she’d been posted to. Finn would laugh himself sick when she told him—if she ever saw him again. This was not how her first mission was supposed to go.Something about this planet felt strangely familiar, though, and so did the mysterious dark figure who found her...





	First Contact

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chthonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chthonia/gifts).



> Dear Chthonia, I hope you enjoy this story! When I saw your prompt for a Darkover crossover, I couldn’t resist giving it a try since I loved those books as a teen (though I haven’t re-read them in years, so I hope my canon knowledge isn’t too rusty).
> 
> NB: Instead of a true crossover, this is a fusion, featuring Star Wars characters in the universe of the Darkover series. As such, it should hopefully be comprehensible even without knowledge of the other canon. 
> 
> Probably the only thing you need to know in order to follow this story is that some people on the planet of Darkover have psychic powers, called _laran_. Oh, and “Aldaran” isn’t a typo, but a Darkovan placename that I couldn’t resist using because of the similarity.

Rey felt like a ship had landed on her. To be fair, it kind of had.

Above her, through the gaping crack in the skimmer’s fuselage, she could see nothing but black and white: pale opal clouds suffused with the moons’ light, black rock dusted with white snow. The wind screamed through the gaping wound in her ship. How long had she been out? It had been daylight when she crashed, at least above the clouds, before the sudden storm had whirled in from the higher mountain ranges to the north and swallowed her small aircraft, forcing her down. 

Rey was a good pilot, but a light ship like this single-person recon and mapping skimmer wasn’t built to get through that kind of heavy weather. And her instruments behaved bizarrely, wavering back and forth between blaring red proximity warnings and silence. She’d gritted her teeth and tried to set it down anywhere, even if there wasn’t enough room; better that than fly head-on into a cliff. It looked as though she’d split the difference.

Her vision was fluttery and blurring, not a good sign. She blinked, and blinked again, and the static in her eyes resolved into snowflakes. It was snowing and the temperature had fallen at least five degrees since sundown.

She’d crash landed on the very first alien world she’d been to, so proud of her new commission and her first posting offplanet. Finn would laugh himself sick when she told him… if she ever saw him again.

This was not how her first mission was supposed to go. Cottman IV might be a relatively new contact, but it was a safe planet by most standards: human-breathable air, relatively few dangerous fauna, a stable civilization that had accepted the return of their long-lost alien relatives with a decent amount of equanimity. But no world, no matter how familiar, was ever perfectly safe, and Rey had been careful setting out for a mapping flight over the mountains. She’d checked the meteorological report (which had been woefully inaccurate), packed survival gear (now scattered across an acre of wilderness with the rest of her ship), and filed a flight plan. 

Focus on that, she told herself. The airbase knew where she was, and they’d send someone in search of her, or at least a drone. All she had to do was survive until then. A day, at most. 

The cracked shell of the downed ship would be a shelter, or at least a windbreak, but she’d need some fuel to keep a fire going. Up here was nothing but barren rock and a little dead grass, dusted with the snow being whipped through the air by the wind. But there was a whole forest down there. She could find firewood. She crawled to her feet slowly, hanging on the tilted pilot’s seat for support, and squeezed out of the torn ship, her jacket catching on a sharp edge.

The icy wind stabbed through her clothes and she pulled her balaclava up over her head and chin for more warmth. Her skull throbbed and her brain felt like a sandbag. She couldn’t think. There was a reason she shouldn’t be stumbling downhill, into the shelter of the trees… her beacon. That was it. The ship’s beacon would be sending out signals and the retrieval team would look for here there.

But they’d search the area too. She’d be safe if she didn’t go too far. And something was calling her into the forest: it felt eerily familiar, though she’d never lived on a world with this kind of temperate evergreen ecosystem before. The tall pillars of the pines, or whatever they were called, towered over her and she shivered but kept slogging forward into the shadows of the forest.

Behind her, the blizzard was building into a howling storm on the heights. Here in the forested valley, it was broken by the thick pines into a roaring rush of wind high overhead and occasional whirling flurries of spiraling snow. The darkness under the trees was deep, impenetrable, and the local name of the inhabitants for their home—Darkover—suddenly seemed very apt. Rey crossed her arms tighter around herself and huddled farther into her parka, ducking her chin into her chest for a moment for warmth. Terran-made high tech synthetics were proving less than capable of coping with the extreme weather of this planet. 

She looked back up and gasped, cold air freezing her lungs. A tall figure all in black towered in front of her, not ten metres away, stark and forbidding against the white snow. Where had it come from? She’d heard nothing, seen nothing. A heavy black cloak lined in fur swept the snow at its booted feet, a black cowl swathing its head was pulled up for shelter from the wind and hid the bottom half of its face. All she could glimpse of its features was a gleam of shining dark eyes.

“Uh, hello—hail, stranger,” she stuttered out in the limited _cahuenga_ she could speak. She’d give herself away as an outsider, but that was unavoidable. Hopefully her accent would pass as a lowland one.

“I heard your call,” he said—for the soft voice was deep and bass, a male voice to Rey’s ears.

She shook her head in confusion. “What?” Rudimentary telegraph technology existed in some places on this planet, but nothing that could have picked up her radio signal back to base.

“When the ship crashed. Your panic, your shock… I could feel them, even though you’re one of the Terrans,” he said. “I thought you were all mind blind.”

Rey didn’t see any way she could believably deny it. At least most Darkovans weren’t strongly xenophobic; though there were some isolationists, they were mostly concentrated in the remote mountainous areas… like the one she’d just crashed in. Shit. If this guy was a representative of some local anti-Terran militia, she was hooped.

“What possessed you to try and cross the Hellers in an airship at this time of year?” he demanded. “I thought you Terrans were supposed to have superior intelligence, or so you claim.”

She bristled. “Well, if I’d known these mountains were called the _Hellers_ I might have reconsidered!” she snapped. “But I was trying to build an accurate topographical rendition, and all the weather data we had said that it would be calm for the next two days—”

He snorted, arrogant and dismissive. “Trusting the weather foretellers was your first mistake. The winds can change direction here faster than a rock deer. And storms blow down from the Wall quicker than you’ll freeze in that useless coat.” He turned, his cloak swinging out over the snow like a dark bird’s wing, and beckoned with one gloved hand. “Come.”

“Where?” Rey stood her ground. She wasn’t going with an unknown alien of uncertain allegiance, at least until she knew where he was headed.

He pointed ahead through the trees, and Rey followed the line of his arm to a small but sturdy-looking shed built of wood and stone. Old snow was already piled thick on its roof and knee-high in front of its door; this was clearly no-one’s home. It must be an emergency shelter for anyone desperate enough to work or travel in this kind of weather. 

He strode toward it and Rey trudged after him, stumbling through the track beaten out by his steps. He kicked away the drift in front of the entrance with his boots and shoved the door open, sending a mini-avalanche of snow tumbling onto the packed frozen earth of the floor. She followed him in cautiously, and he thrust a bucket into her numb hands. “Fill that with snow while I get a fire started,” he ordered her.

She obeyed, resentfully, but she obeyed because it was obvious he knew what he was doing. Her survival courses had stressed things like how to quickly seal an atmosphere leak, not build a fire with tools from the Stone Age.

By the time she’d scooped up a bucket of undisturbed snow and returned to the cramped shed, he’d coaxed a small but growing fire out of the wood left piled inside. She had to grudgingly admire his skill. He grunted his thanks when she passed him the bucket, hanging it on a peg to the side of the hearth where it could melt without dousing the flames.

He didn’t issue her another task and Rey’s exhaustion was making her light-headed—either that or the head injury. She sat down on a thick stump that seemed to be meant for a chair and watched mindlessly as he carefully laid a few more sticks on the fire.

The pine wood spat as the resin inside caught and sparks shot up. He’d unwound the cowl from his head and let it drop around his shoulders; the face revealed was split in two, half gilded and half in shadow, long dark hair falling down over it. She had no idea if this man would be considered attractive by his fellow Darkovans, but she didn’t mind his big nose and dark eyes, or the large hands competently building up the fire. And he was obviously well-off: fine clothing, shiny hair, clear skin, and built like a heavy ion cannon. Clearly he hadn’t suffered from any privation in his life. He must be one of the nobility, the Comyn as they called themselves.

Like most of the high-caste men she’d seen so far on this backward world, he carried a long knife at his hip, though for someone his height it was more like a sword. But he also wore something she’d never seen before: a strange red jewel dangling from a chain around his neck. Rey was almost convinced she could see it pulsing in strange energy waves shot through with darkness. It must be the firelight combined with her blurry vision.

The stranger sat back on his heels, gloved hands resting on his knees, and regarded the sputtering fire dubiously. “It will have to do,” he muttered at last. Then he turned to look at her and Rey felt pinned by the intense stare of those shining black eyes.

“Who are you? Your name, your clan—or do Terrans not have those?” he demanded.

To pass unchallenged in a lot of shame-based cultures, it was easiest to follow their codes of honorable behaviour, or to convince them you were “pure” and worthy of not being attacked. Rey still had her taser, if it came to that, and she was pretty sure a guy this big wouldn’t be expecting her to put up much of a fight. But the element of surprise would be her biggest advantage in a struggle, so she’d try to appear meek and unthreatening until it was better not to.

“Not exactly,” she said politely. “My name is Rey. And I’m actually not from Terra, but from a planet you’d never have heard of, called Jakku.”

It seemed like a good time to show her face and prove she was just the normal human being she claimed to be. But when she pulled off her balaclava, he reacted as though she had six eyes. He lost his balance, falling back on his heels and almost into the fire before he caught himself with a hand to the stone hearth. His mouth worked in soundless shock. “It’s you,” he gasped at last. “You’re the girl.”

Rey stared back at him, beginning to feel a quiver of true fear. She might be out of the storm, but now she was stuck with an alien suffering from unspecified delusions. “What girl?” she asked cautiously. That seemed safe enough. She subtly eased backward, out of the reach of his long arms.

“You don’t know me?” His voice was quiet, but the hurt and anger that ran throbbing through it were strong enough for Rey to taste.

She shook her head in bewilderment. “How could I? I’ve never set foot on this planet until a month ago!”

“I saw you, I spoke to you! I thought they were visions, or dreams. My uncle convinced me they were just echoes of a time long past.” His voice rose in confusion. “But you _answered_ me, at first! Do you not remember?”

Rey’s throat went dry. Sure, she’d had dreams about a dark-haired kid, someone to talk to when she felt totally alone in the world. But her imaginary friend had never been real. And when she kept insisting that he talked to her, it made her fosterers nervous and lowered the psychological stability scores she needed to get into space. So she’d started ignoring the boy, and at last he’d faded away. She hadn’t seen him in years. 

“I imagined someone like you once, that’s all.” She steadfastly dismissed the way she’d kept dreaming about her imaginary friend, as though her unconscious mind refused to let go of him even when she knew he wasn’t real: dreams that had featured watching him learn to ride a horse, or talking to him about her dreams of flight.

“But you’re here now, perhaps you were called to this planet,” he argued. “And you must have _laran_. Otherwise, our minds could never have touched as children. Or how could we be talking now? You’ve spoken far better _cahuenga_ in the past ten minutes, and with an Aldaran accent. You’re taking it out of my thoughts.”

Rey started to deny it and stopped, her mouth open, stuck between languages. He was right—she'd been talking freely and fluently to him, using words and idioms she’d never learned in the basic classes.

“I don’t understand,” she said, keeping her voice steady with an inhuman effort. “I thought _laran_ was just telekinesis, but you make it sound like… like astral travelling, or magic, almost. That can’t be possible. And how could I have this talent, anyway, if I’m not from here?” She pushed away the thought that his presence felt familiar, like calling to like, and that the thing that had always lain sleeping inside her had been stirring ever since she landed on this planet.

“Your parents, who are they?”

She bit her lip and looked away from his face, into the flames. “I don’t know,” she said shortly, her voice tight in her own ears. “They abandoned me when I was a baby. I don’t remember.” Dead or deadbeat, who knew? Rey had stopped trying to figure it out long ago. She’d spent too much time hoping that someone would come looking for her one day, and in the end she’d decided that she had to go searching for something she wanted herself.

He was still staring at her with that wild, stunned look in his wide eyes. He blinked and said, “You’re not alone. I can prove it. Let me show you.” He stripped off his sodden glove and reached out, his hand shaking with fine tremors: cold or nerves? She hesitated, put her other hand on her taser, just in case, and then seized his hand in her own bare fingers.

The crude hut around them vanished. Instead of sitting beside a small, smoky fire, they stood in the centre of a vast snowy forest like the one outside except that it was still and silent, no wind tearing through the boughs overhead. And they were not themselves. Instead of a man dressed in black, the Comyn lordling was a vast shadowy figure in a mask riven with cracks and fissures of light that flickered back and forth, from red through golden yellow to white and back again. A burning coal of fire irradiated his breast, and his eyes were shining black pools. She gasped, stumbling back, and gasped again as she looked down at herself.

She was wearing fine polished armour, shining like a star, and a sword was belted at her hip. A sword! She’d never even touched one, yet when her hands wrapped around the hilt it felt right and true. Her muscles knew what to do with it, and she had drawn it before she realized what they meant to do. It ran with living blue fire, like a shard of the summer sky brought down to...here. Wherever _here_ was.

“Where are we?” she asked. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears, echoing in the space as though it were empty instead of being muffled among the trees she could see all around her.

“The overworld,” the Comyn replied. His voice was exactly the same, deep and rich and surprisingly soft; it seemed strange issuing from that monstrous form. “Have you never travelled here? Do you truly not remember meeting me before?”

“It was a dream,” Rey whispered, her voice shaking. “I was a child and it was just a dream.”

“No!” He loomed over her, clenching his hands into fists. “Don’t lie to yourself. I _knew_ it was real, but I let my uncle convince me that you must be a vision of the past, an echo of some long ago Keeper…”

“I can’t be who you think I am!” Rey shouted.

“It doesn’t matter who you are,” he said flatly. “What matters is what you can do. And you are strong in _laran_ , or you couldn’t stand in this place. I’ll show you—” And he strode forward, drawing a sword like a tongue of flame from thin air and striking at her.

Rey snarled and somehow, though she’d never used a sword in her life, hers leapt up and blocked his. Anger at his arrogance coursed through her veins, and the blue fire along her blade jumped and flickered higher. The weird purple light thrown off by their clashing blades cast strange reflections in his eyes as he stared at her over the crossed swords.

A wild vertiginous sensation dizzied her as she fell into darkness. Suddenly, she knew him. She almost was him: Ben Solo, who ought to have been the most blessed man on Darkover. He came of a noble house; his mother was the daughter of the Master of the Aldaran domain. His father was a common soldier, elevated only by his cunning and courage, but widely acknowledged to be charming and born with the gods’ own luck.

More importantly, his mother’s family were strong in the mind-skills of _laran_. She had been intended for the Keeper of a Tower circle, until her parents’ sudden death catapulted her to rule; and the chaos of the following civil strife revealed that she had an unknown twin, a brother also uncannily strong in _laran_. When the two of them were together, they shone so brightly on the overworld that it was like dual suns.

Ben had inherited many of these gifts in full measure. He might not have his mother’s diplomatic tact or his father’s gilded tongue; but he was tall, and strong enough to beat grown men into the ground when his voice was barely cracking.

And his _laran_ flowed strongly. So strongly that it led to mutters that a man with that much power was uncanny. His uncle had faced some of the same prejudice from those who thought it better for a woman to channel _laran_ , since she could tame it; but unlike him, Ben’s _laran_ was never placid, but wild, so unstable he could barely control it. His uncle spent years patiently trying to teach him restraint, but like a river in full flood, his power always burst through his feeble attempts to dam it and roared into destructive force.

When he was very young they gave him a _laran_ matrix, one of the star stones, in an attempt to help him focus and harness his power. For a time it seemed to work; but then he overloaded it until it cracked and its glow turned a baleful red, instead of the icy blue such stones were meant to be: a bad omen. But Ben refused to give up the stone.

He was not one to confide in anyone, either as a boy or a man, but once he did ask his uncle if one could see through time on the overworld. Master Luke sifted his words for more clues, but all Ben would say was that he saw visions, and wasn’t always certain whether they were of things past or to come.

Luke told him the truth, which was that _laran_ visions were inherently unreliable, and might be of places and people hundreds of years ago or still to come. So Ben grew up thinking that the young girl he’d seen in his mind’s eye ever since he could remember must be long-dead, a heroine who’d lived in the Ages of Chaos, and he let himself care for her as he didn’t think he’d ever care for someone else, even after she closed herself away from him. She’d been right to do so, after all, if they could never be more than ghosts to each other.

But from time to time throughout the years he continued to catch glimpses of her: sweating through hard training, curled up in a ball in her lonely bed. She never spoke to him again; she didn’t seem to want to acknowledge that he existed, though he suspected she could still see him.

Rey came back to herself with a gasp. Her arms trembled from the weight of her armour and her burning sword, though it felt more like mental fatigue than physical. She stepped back, disengaging from Ben’s gaze and freeing her blade with an unfamiliar twist of the wrist. The trees around them shivered and wavered like ripples in water, and she blinked, unable to maintain her hold on her body in this strange, fantastic place...

Suddenly Rey was back in the normal world, in her own, normal body, shivering in damp clothes in front of a smoky fire. She held up one bare hand in the firelight and stared at it. What had she done? What power had been unleashed inside her?

“Come with me,” Ben said urgently. “Meet my mother, and my uncle. If you doubt me, ask them. You need to learn. You have so much raw power that you’re a danger to yourself if you don’t.” _Like me_ , she heard him add, though his lips didn’t move.

Rey was stunned. They’d been told that the Aldaran domain was off-limits to Terrans, that its people were notoriously proud, dangerously insular and unfriendly. “Do Not Approach” was the official diplomatic policy, even though they were politically powerful. And now the Heir to the Domain was sitting beside her in a crude shed, inviting her back to his—castle? Or whatever his home was.

“I’m not one of you,” she protested weakly. “I’m a Terran, an alien, a complete stranger to this planet.”

“Not to me.” His eyes were pleading. “Remember, we knew each other once before.”

He held out his hand again, and she hesitated. What would happen if she went with him? Would she be a guest, or a prisoner?

In that weird doubling of mental impressions again, she knew that he could feel her doubts, and was mildly insulted by them. “Whatever the rest of the Comyn might like to say about the Aldarans, we haven’t imprisoned a guest since the Ages of Chaos,” he said. “My mother certainly would never allow it. You’ll be free to send your people a message by courier as soon as we reach the hall.”

Through his mind, Rey caught a glimpse of his mother: small in stature but overpowering in the force of her personality, constantly accompanied by her grave brother. She closed her eyes, straining to consciously use this strange affinity between them for the first time, desperate to know if he told the truth. She sensed confusion in him, and darkness, but he didn't mean her any harm.

Rey opened her eyes again. He hadn’t looked away; his bare hand was still extended toward her. “Alright.” She drew in a deep breath and reached out to clasp it in hers. "I'll come."

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [redacted] for their swift and helpful beta commentary!


End file.
